Myth and Magic in Washington Irving

Starting with Irving makes sense in some ways. He is historically recognized as the first internationally respected American author. Especially in terms of short fiction, he is a legitimate grandfather-figure for future writers in the United States. It is worth observing, however, that there was certainly writing with elements of myth and magic in it in the colonial New World prior to Irving. Myth and magic pervades Native American traditions, and European immigrants brought with them the ghost stories and magical tales of their home countries. Washington Irving approaches this background of myth and magic with wit and sophistication in the two stories we read for our course.

Washington Irving

I am especially interested in the paratext surrounding "Rip Van Winkle." Irving goes to pains to set up his story as based on a real document, a " tale ... found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York." After it is completed, he further contextualizes the story in terms of Native American folklore (via the post-script about the Indian Spirit or Manitou of the "Catskill Mountains"). The implication here seems to be that the European colonialists in the New World lived midst a world of fable and magic that they did not understand (except perhaps Irving himself) but which nonetheless could affect them. Magic, in this context, comes from the unknown and exotic (to Irving) world of the Native Americans living in rural upstate New York.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is more sly in its depiction of magic. The magic is revealed as a mere practical joke, which nonetheless fools the superstitious villagers. It is primarily a story in which an oddball intellectual and strict schoolmaster gets his comeuppance by the village bully, but it is told from a position sympathetic to Ichabod (and to superstitious American villagers), so the dread and magic are taken seriously for a while. The idea is to portray superstitious Americans in a humorous way, while maintaining a suave and controlled distance through the sophistication of the narrator and the lyrical elegance of his prose. The magic may be phony in this story, but the portrayal of foolish American Dutch immigrants is not.

This narrative distance from superstition and magic is an aspect of what I called in class, "cosmopolitanism," an idea which I opposed to "provincialism." Irving uses the elegance and control of his prose style, combined with his gently mocking tone toward foolish small town Americans as a way of lending himself credibility with the readers he sought--as a way of making himself out to be cosmopolitan and worldly, despite the fact that he was an American. I assume part of this is mere defensiveness on Irving's part. Being a literary writer at this early stage in the history of the United States meant risking judgment and scorn from Europe, which at the time dominated and defined "high" cultural concerns like literary fiction. An American writer would be assumed to be rough and uncouth--in short, a provincial.

Irving implicitly defends himself against such European skepticism by himself portraying Americans as provincial. He delights in his subject's naiveté and superstition, having much fun with it at the expense of the Dutch Villagers he wrote about. This could potentially come off as narrow and mean-spirited, but part of Irving's gift is his ability to also express compassion and understanding towards his subjects, even as he mocks their childishness. Irving doesn't so much sneer at characters like Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle, though he does have some fun at their expense.

As readers, we are invited to participate in this fun and, for the time we are reading his stories, to share Irving's perspective on his fellow Americans of the early nineteenth century. Irving encourages us, his readers, to see the world through his own cosmopolitan outlook, and in doing so, he promotes such an outlook and the assumptions that go along with it. In this way, his stories are part of a cultural movement to promote sophistication, awareness, and skepticism--among other cosmopolitan values--on the part of emergent American literary audiences.

As more and more Americans became literate, the market for fiction broadened. Perhaps the most important aspects of this cultural education for the United States was the emergence of a middle class readership, one that included increasing numbers of women and young people. As we shall see as the course proceeds, this change in audiences has had a profound effect on subsequent literature. Myth and magic persist but in excitingly diverse new forms.